Harnessing the power of data

In fall of 2021, we embarked on a semester-long, project-based arc in the working group to empower folks in R. Our goal is to get folks to move from the "I have a messy database, and my advisor told me I should learn R to analyse it. What do I do?" to generating organized data analysis projects in R.

The Semester's Agenda (Rough and Very Subject to Change)

Session 1

• Introductions
• Github
  • https://happygitwithr.com/
• R projects
  • https://rstats.wtf/

Session 2

• Loading data
  • Data structures and why they matter
• Cleaning data
• Practice

Session 3

• Basic analysis (What do these data even look like?)
• Descriptive statistics
• Summary statistics

Session 4

• Group work: forming a hypothesis and doing summary stats
• Formulate a plan
  • What functions do you need?
  • What functions are you missing?

Session 5

• Learning new packages and functions
  • Where to start?
  • How to find answers
  • How to ask questions

Session 6

• Generating markdown reports
• Practice writing a report on some class work

Session 7

• Group work on a project

Session 8

• Present group work
• Summarize and reflect on the semester
• Brainstorming topics of interest